A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Yes, the GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion is really making a strong debut. With it’s unique design, the new board is already building itself quite the resume. A few weeks ago, a Secret OC session took place at the GIGABYTE HQ where a total of 9 World Records, 22 Global Firsts and 25 Hardware Firsts were accomplished by 7 of the world’s finest overclockers, all using the X99-SOC Champion. Within these achievements, an impressive performance was submitted by HiCookie with the Highest DDR4 Memory Clock at 4014.6 MHz!!

Well ladies and gentlemen, our famous overclocker just can’t be stopped! Yesterday, HiCookie with the help of Jake and Sofos1990 managed to push this limit to an incredible 4184MHz using Corsair’s Dominator Platinum memory modules. Now THAT'’s a performance!

Since Z97-Force LN2’s memory record, a new standard has been establish to claim top memory scores. So we took out the big hardware, a very expensive oscilloscope, to prove that no cheating took place. Here is the video:

And to top it off, today HWBOT.org published their December achievement review. Taking the first place for this month's most used Motherboards for WR and GFP at HWBOT (… drum roll …) The GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion!! Here is the press release: http://hwbot.org/news/11725

I don’t know for you guys, but I’m looking forward to 2015 to see what the overclocking world and the GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion has to surprise us!

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

HWBOT held another crazy Country Cup tournament or “World Cup of overclocking” as they refer to it and it another stunner in 2014. Australia has successfully defended their title this year in a convincing style, winning all 5 stages. France, Indonesia and Romania made sure that at least some of the stages went down to the wire and no doubt will set precedent for another huge clash in 2015.

Let’s talk about this competition a little for those of you who were not aware there was “an overclocking World Cup” on and how you could get involved next year.

First of all for any of you unfamiliar with the biggest and best known overclocking competition website in the world, make sure you visit HWBOT.ORG. For overclockers, this is a familiar website but perhaps for non-overclockers you may remember the recent articles on ban of Windows 8 for competitive purposes which was largely the result of the HWBOT admin team finding some loopholes in the latest Microsoft OS which have since been patched in most cases. Yes, that’s right, this is the gathering place of some of the world’s biggest and best geeks AND nerds who share a passion for overclocking. It’s become a big community in the last 10 years so definitely something to check out in your free time!

Here is a little more about what County Cup is about from HWBOT Country Cup competition page. The most important thing to remember here is that it is a country wide competition and it is practically impossible to compete without a large community contributing to the results. Overclockers with little experience as well as pro clockers combined efforts to represent their countries and it is important to note that it really is for everyone.

The stages were reduced and somewhat simplified this year. There was an interesting stage only reserved for rookies which were limited in cooling to normal cooling (air and water cooling). Another new addition was the surprise stage which was announced in the last 24 hours. Last stage was awarded a lot of points and could have really made a big impact on final results but didn’t to the relief of all the top runners.

Prizes were pretty generous even though overclockers’ primary motivation was to represent their nations. Australia and France battled it out on majority of stages. It was a test of skills, dedication, organisation and perseverance which a more experienced Australian team was able to triumph with a strong lineup of pro overclockers and rookies combined. Indonesia was also showing some great fighting spirit in later rounds as was the unlucky Romania which lost its third place in the final stage with Indonesia shooting past them with their final Stage 5 submission.

Congratulations to all and all the best to Australia on an emphatic win!

Here are some of our score highlights this year. Considering Australians really did such a great overall job we’ve pulled out some of their best scores to show you!

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Yay, Hardware Asylum podcast is out. In case you guys have not heard of these guys before, make sure you visit their website. I would describe them as a down to earth tech website/podcast geared towards a novice and pro level overclocker or enthusiast alike. The podcast is easy to follow and dissects fairly complex topics and talks about interesting hardware, developments and competitions in this particular episode.

GIGABYTE has been the leading market innovator in the dedicated overclocking motherboards and it’s good to see someone put it into perspective (i.e. overclocking boards existed well before our first series but there was no dedicated product serious which focuses features specifically towards enthusiasts and overclocking until GIGABYTE started it all some 5-6 years ago).

Show Notes

Gigabyte Motherboard EvolutionReviewing motherboards isn’t always the easiest and every reviewer tends to look at different aspects. Some are super critical of fan controls while others may only look at feature differences between an entire group. The reviews at Hardware Asylum often focus on features and what makes the board special. Some are designed for overclocking while others may cater to the gamer. One thing Dennis has noticed over the years is that motherboard designs change based on what users are doing in the marketplace.

A perfect example of this evolution is the Gigabyte OC products dedicated to overclocking. Of course overclocking isn’t the only thing you can use these motherboards for but, the marketing has been designed such that overclocking is first.

The rouges gallery contains every “mainstream” OC motherboard that Gigabyte has produced staring with the X58A-OC and ending with the X99 SOC Force. In the podcast Dennis mentions a few unicorns with even more to offer.

A Change to Live Overclocking CompetitionsThere was an article published on Hardware Asylum that talked about how overclocking competitions needed to change if they were to grow into a full ocSport. Some of the points in the article included removing “bin” from the equation and changing the structure to be more of a game that challenged the overclocker to get the best score possible within a limited set of constraints, submit a score and then do it again.

In this segment Dennis and Darren discuss the new competition format and how it can actually make competitions better for everyone from the manufacturers making the hardware to the overclockers dedicating their time to the hobby/sport and the media struggling to find interest in this niche.

Hardware Asylum have little experience and information on our upcoming X99 SOC Champion board just yet but let’s just say that it will be continuing the legacy X58A-OC started. Incidentally, TeamAU broke another world record with this board today, the 3DMARK11. Here is the score and what this board has been used to achieve so far. There is going to be a heck of a lot more to come, stay tuned!

Friday, December 12, 2014

Along with our in-house overclockers HiCookie, Sofos and Dino, we invited 4
of the world’s best overclockers to the GIGABYTE OC lab to test the new X99-SOC
Champion motherboard and see if it really lives up to its Champion name.

The results are impressive; after 7 days of almost nonstop benching, the team
of elite overclockers achieved a total of 9 World Records, 22 Global Firsts and
25 Hardware Firsts all using the X99-SOC Champion. On top of that, HiCookie also
managed to reach the Highest DDR4 Memory Clock Worldwide Overall Ranking for X99
motherboards with a frequency of 4014.6 MHz (Quad Channel).

Monday, December 8, 2014

This is it guys, the last OC competition of 2014! So get ready, tune your GIGBAYTE Z97 motherboards and run for the best performance. Here are the details for this challenge. You can also visit the competition page on HWBOT for all the rules and tracking of all scores.